Zaid Jilani, a former blogger with the left-wing think tank Center for American Progress, explained this week how the Obama administration frequently tries to censor the progressive organization’s content when it departs from the White House’s agenda.

Jiliani was reacting to two on-air protests by journalists opposed to Russia’s invasion of southern Ukraine. The two worked for Russia Today (RT) — an English-speaking media outlet funded directly by Moscow — and felt their bosses were trying to censor their opinions.

Zaid Jilani, a former blogger with the left-wing think tank Center for American Progress, explained this week how the Obama administration frequently tries to censor the progressive organization’s content when it departs from the White House’s agenda.

Jiliani was reacting to two on-air protests by journalists opposed to Russia’s invasion of southern Ukraine. The two worked for Russia Today (RT) — an English-speaking media outlet funded directly by Moscow — and felt their bosses were trying to censor their opinions...

...(Lubbock city councilman Victor) Hernandez, who chairs the local chapter Tejano Democrats, is furious about Abbott’s appeal to Hispanic voters in his city. Even though Abbott was met by a crowd of supporters at Jimenez Bakery and Restaurant last week, Hernandez branded the stop as “offensive” to Hispanics and “beyond any sense of decency.”

He criticized Abbott and Republican candidates for not clearing their visit with local Hispanic groups.

...The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal said Hernandez couldn’t recall specific examples of Wendy Davis showing the same deference to such groups. But he has doubled down on his fiery denunciation of the Republican candidate, and now he’s in hot water over his alleged use of the word “prop” to describe Cecilia Abbott, Greg Abbott’s Hispanic wife of 33 years.

In a post about the incident, PJ Media’s Bryan Preston reports that Hernandez labeled Cecilia Abbott “a prop” in her husband’s efforts to appeal to Hispanics. Abbott tweeted that Hernandez’s comments were “deeply offensive.”

Tolerance in a two-way street. That little phrase is bandied about all the time by the fanatical Left whenever they feel like condemning a conservative for perceived intolerance. The Left frequently claims the mantle of tolerance, making themselves into modern deities. It is their alleged willingness to love all people, no matter their beliefs, that makes them such wonderful, compassionate people. Well, that’s their tag line, at least. The truth—as is often the case—is far from what the Left would have you believe. Just as was recently said by Chris Christie, the Democrats are the Party of intolerance, not the Republicans.

A perfect example illustrating my argument, you say? Of course! According to Fox News:

“Rutgers University professors and students are crying foul over the school’s decision to invite former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to speak at this year’s commencement ceremony.

Being our brother's keeper starts with the government obeying the law of not depriving people of their right to property and letting a brotha keep what he earned. You'd be surprised how much more generous people are with their time and money when they're not getting ripped off. - Alfonzo Rachel

Friday, March 7, 2014

So, ‪#‎LoisLerner‬ is afraid of self incrimination if she testifies before the Congressional committee, but she'll sit down with federal prosecutors for a lengthy interview. Either the Justice Dept. has given her immunity, which her lawyers refute, or she's not at all afraid that Justice is serious about their probe of IRS mistreatment of conservative groups.

'Her lawyers decided to let her talk to DOJ prosecutors because they have “every confidence” that they are fair-minded and haven’t prejudged the facts, Mr. Taylor said. GOP committee members, by contrast, intended only to “vilify” Ms. Lerner, he said.

Some legal experts said they found the circumstances puzzling.

“It does strike me as a little odd,” said George Thomas III, a Rutgers law professor who’s an expert on criminal procedure. “One explanation is the one given by her lawyer. The other, darker explanation is that she and her lawyer think the DOJ is not interested in a serious investigation of the IRS treatment of these tax exempt groups.”'

Perhaps it's time for chairman Issa to have her held in contempt of Congress. What do YOU think?

When he spoke to the packed ballroom at CPAC on Friday, Sen. Rand Paul emphasized one thing: Liberty.

That appeared to satisfy the legions of young people who filed into the hall to see the more libertarian Republican senator from Kentucky, and it appeared to be Paul's primary goal.

"Imagine a time when our great country is governed by the Constitution, imagine a time when the White House is once again occupied by a friend of liberty," he said. "You may think I'm talking about electing Republicans -- I'm not, I'm talking about electing lovers of liberty."

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) rallied the early morning crowd to its feet to kick off the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference, giving one of the more rousing speeches so far delivered at the three-day event.

"It is time for Washington to focus on the few things the Constitution establishes as the federal government's role. Defend our country, provide a cogent foreign policy, and what the heck, deliver the mail, preferably on time and on Saturdays," Perry said, bouncing on his heels and waving his fist, whipping the conservative crowd into a frenzy.
"Get out of the healthcare business. Get out of the education business. Stop hammering industry. Wake the sleeping giant of American enterprise," Perry said to roaring cheers.

President Vladimir Putin rebuffed a warning from U.S. President Barack Obama over Moscow's military intervention in Crimea, saying on Friday that Russia could not ignore calls for help from Russian speakers in Ukraine.

After an hour-long telephone call, Putin said in a statement that Moscow and Washington were still far apart on the situation in the former Soviet republic, where he said the new authorities had taken "absolutely illegitimate decisions on the eastern, southeastern and Crimea regions.

"Russia cannot ignore calls for help and it acts accordingly, in full compliance with international law," Putin said.

In the week since Obama first declared there would be "costs" if Putin pressed into Crimea, Russian forces have taken control of the region and a referendum has been scheduled to decide its future. Obama declared the March 16 vote a violation of international law, but in a region where ethnic Russians are the majority, the referendum seems likely to become another barrier to White House efforts to compel Putin to pull his forces from Crimea.

Russia has been playing a much more intricate game than the United States in recent years. The resulting imbalance has created a growing threat to global stability, as evidenced last week by Vladimir Putin's invasion of neighboring Ukraine. The ability to turn the tables and put the Russian leader in check lies right beneath our feet, in the form of vast supplies of natural energy.

Under Mr. Putin, Russia has expanded its military and tightened its grip on its neighbors by aggressively making the most of its vast resources, exporting oil, coal and natural gas in massive quantities to Europe and elsewhere. Russia's neighbors need large quantities of natural gas—and, currently lacking a better option, they buy much of it from Russia. This dependence has diplomatic repercussions, making them more reluctant to challenge some of Mr. Putin's arrogant actions.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Finally, Issa told Lerner that another IRS executive had told the oversight panel that she had ordered that Tea Party applications be subjected to a “multi-level review.” She refused to explain why she singled out Tea Party applications for such reviews.

These simple questions – each based on indisputable facts – establish that somebody outside of the IRS told her they wanted the tax agency to “fix” something involving groups seeking 501(c)(4) tax status, that she directed subordinates to begin a (c)(4) project she feared could be seen as “political,” that she viewed Tea Party groups as “dangerous,” and that she ordered that such groups be subjected to “multi-level review.” Those are the four essential points of the IRS scandal: Who ordered the tax agency to get involved, who in the tax agency responded, who they targeted and what actions they took. She cannot answer these questions because, as she herself has claimed, that would be incriminating. Lerner and others must hope Issa doesn’t already have the answers.

he House will continue its efforts to push back against the “imperial presidency” next week, by voting on additional legislation that would allow Congress to challenge executive moves in federal court.

“Clearly President Obama has taken the über presidency to a whole new level,” McMorris Rodgers said. “While it’s not new for presidents to stretch their constitutional limits of power, executive overreach has accelerated at a faster pace under President Obama.”

“Throughout his tenure we have witnessed a pattern,” she said. “When the president disagrees with laws, he ignores them. And now that Obamacare isn’t working, President Obama is rewriting his own law on a whim.”

“He may have his pen and his phone, but we have the Constitution, and we must abide by it,” McMorris Rodgers said.

Republican complaints against Obama’s unilateral actions were only exacerbated this week when the administration announced that individuals would be able to keep their so-called “substandard” health insurance plans that do not comply with Obamacare until October 2017.

“This is just another example of the president picking and choosing portions of the law that he wants to enforce,” McMorris Rodgers said. “If you’ve spent any time around the legislative process, you know that there’s a big difference between the word ‘shall’ and ‘may.’ And you don’t have the choice when you are implementing the law to decide that you’re going to treat it as a ‘may.’ And that is what this president is doing.”

“[Obama] is unilaterally deciding what portions of the law he is going to implement and how and when he’s going to go about that,” she said.

In introducing Cruz, the president and publisher of Regnery Publishing said this:

“If you’ve attended CPAC in the past, you know that the speakers you’ll hear from will shock, delight, amaze, inform, incense and inspire you. So what better way to start off this conference than with a man who has provoked every one of those emotions in just his first year in Washington: Senator Ted Cruz.”

Ted Cruz, the rock-ribbed conservative Texas senator who figures to be a factor in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, told thousands of conservatives Thursday morning that the IRS should go the way of the dodo.

'We need to abolish the IRS,' he said, calling instead for a flat income tax rate and a user-friendly tax return that can be filed on a postcard.

That verbal gauntlet, thrown as much at a near-century of tax collection as at the Obama administration, was Cruz's biggest applause line.

'By virtue of your being here today,' he jokingly cautioned the nation's largest annual gathering of politically conservative activists, 'tomorrow each and every one of you is going to be audited by the IRS.'

Sen. Ted Cruz called for the abolition of the IRS and the repeal of Obamacare in a rousing speech to kick off the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday. Follow us for all your ‪#‎CPAC2014‬ updates!

Conservatives are gathering from across the country in D.C., and they are doing so in the shadow of an international crisis that will bring seriousness to the speeches they hear and the conversations they have.

For many years now CPAC has been an orgy of finger-pointing as various groups within the conservative movement nod at each other as the root cause of the rise of Barack Obama, never fully grasping that the president's rise was an almost inevitable byproduct of a national withdrawal from the hard realities of a post 9/11 world.

◼ CPAC is expected to draw at least 10, 000 conservatives from across the country. For conservative voters and activists, CPAC is an opportunity to hear and meet conservative politicians, leaders and intellectuals, all of whom share basic values of limited government, lower taxes, less regulations, free markets, individual liberty and family, among others. For politicians, on the other hand, CPAC is a unique opportunity to speak and connect with grassroots activists.

The event will feature a slate of potential 2016 presidential candidates, including Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio and Governors Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie. The New Jersey governor was denied a speaking slot last year following his “bromance” with President Obama in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

McClatchy and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it. The CIA sharply disputes the committee’s findings.

(Senator Mark) Udall, a Colorado Democrat and one of the CIA’s leading pursuers on the committee, appeared to reference that surreptitious spying on Congress, which Udall said undermined democratic principles.

“As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight powers and for our democracy,” Udall wrote to Obama on Tuesday.

Congressional aides involved in preparing the Senate Intelligence Committee’s unreleased study of the CIA’s secret interrogation and detention program walked out of the spy agency’s fortress-like headquarters with classified documents that the CIA contended they weren’t authorized to have, McClatchy has learned.

Welcome to the 21st century, which is looking a whole lot like the 20th when it comes to CIA fooling around in places it shouldn't be. The Times story is short on specifics but includes this gem from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) who generally has never met a government incursion against civil liberties she doesn't like.

Asked about the tension between the committee and the spy agency it oversees, Ms. Feinstein said, “Our oversight role will prevail.”

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and ex officio member of the intelligence committee, said the alleged monitoring was potentially “extremely serious.”

“If, as alleged in the media, CIA accessed without permission or authority a computer network dedicated for use by a Senate committee, it would be an extremely serious matter. Such activity, if it occurred as alleged, would impede Congress’ ability to carry out its constitutional oversight responsibilities and could violate federal law,” Levin said in a statement on Wednesday

...a third JPMorgan banker committed suicide, this time at the JPMorgan Charter House Asia headquarters in central Hong Kong, where a 33 year old man who was said to have been an FX trader for JPM, just jumped to his death.

(T)he 28-year-old CEO of Singapore-based Bitcoin exchange First Meta has been found dead. The exact reason that may have led to the suicide is not known, and whether the Police have concluded that the cause of death is suicide is also unofficial.

There have been 9 senior financial services deaths in recent weeks:

1 – William Broeksmit, 58-year-old former senior executive at Deutsche Bank AG, was found dead in his home after an apparent suicide in South Kensington in central London, on January 26th.

2- Karl Slym, 51 year old Tata Motors managing director Karl Slym, was found dead on the fourth floor of the Shangri-La hotel in Bangkok on January 27th.

3 – Gabriel Magee, a 39-year-old JP Morgan employee, died after falling from the roof of the JP Morgan European headquarters in London on January 27th.

4 – Mike Dueker, 50-year-old chief economist of a US investment bank was found dead close to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State.

5 – Richard Talley, the 57 year old founder of American Title Services in Centennial, Colorado, was found dead earlier this month after apparently shooting himself with a nail gun.

6 -Tim Dickenson, a U.K.-based communications director at Swiss Re AG, also died last month, however the circumstances surrounding his death are still unknown.

7 – Ryan Henry Crane, a 37 year old executive at JP Morgan died in an alleged suicide just a few weeks ago. No details have been released about his death aside from this small obituary announcement at the Stamford Daily Voice.

Crimea's parliament voted to join Russia on Thursday and its Moscow-backed government set a referendum within 10 days on the decision in a dramatic escalation of the crisis over the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula.

The sudden acceleration of moves to bring Crimea, which has an ethnic Russian majority and has effectively been seized by Russian forces, formally under Moscow's rule came as European Union leaders gathered for an emergency summit to find ways to pressure Russia to back down.

U.S. President Barack Obama took steps to punish those involved in threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, ordering the freezing of their U.S. assets and a ban on travel into the United States.

Obama couldn't be bothered with preserving America's victory in Iraq. He was busy helping to topple a strong American ally in Egypt and a slavish American minion in Libya -- in order to install the Muslim Brotherhood in those countries instead. (That didn't work out so well for U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans murdered in Benghazi.)

So now, another Russian leader is playing cat-and-mouse with an American president -- and guess who's the mouse? Putin has taunted Obama in Iran, in Syria and with Edward Snowden. By now, Obama has become such an object for Putin's amusement that the fastest way to get the Russians out of Crimea would be for Obama to call on Putin to invade Ukraine.

Public discussion on Ukraine is all about confrontation. But do we know where we are going? In my life, I have seen four wars begun with great enthusiasm and public support, all of which we did not know how to end and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally. The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins....

This comes on the heels of the Obama family’s his & her separate Washington’s Birthday weekend vacations (three weeks ago), which followed on the Obama family’s Hawaii Christmas vacation that First Lady Michelle Obama stayed on well in to January (nine weeks ago) after the rest of the family returned to Washington.

Fresh off the first family’s sixth annual winter vacation to the Hawaiian island of Oahu — billed to American taxpayers at a cost of $4 million — Michelle Obama and the first daughters Malia and Sasha will now jet off to China for over a week of much-needed sightseeing.

For example...Obama's budget isn't the most transparent document. Those wanting to get a breakdown of the tax increases (without the benefit of my awesome recent post on the subject), would have to go line-by-line through a 24-page table, in which tax and fee increases are mixed in with changes to Medicare and other mandatory spending. Starting on page 195, and continuing for several pages, there's a long list of tax increases on businesses totaling $250 billion, described as a “reserve for long-run revenue-neutral business tax reform.”

Then, on the bottom of page 200, there’s a footnote, which reads: “Because the Administration believes that these proposals should be enacted in the context of comprehensive business tax reform, the amounts are not reflected in the budget estimates of receipts and are not counted toward meeting the Administration’s deficit reduction goals. The budget estimates do include $150 billion in temporary revenues that would be generated by the transition to a reformed business tax system, shown as part of the proposal to reauthorize surface transportation above.”

Rep. Dave Camp also revealed that federal agents conducting an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service's bid to punish Tea Party and conservative critics of the president have yet to talk to a single target of the scandal....

“I don’t fully understand why it’s taken them so long given that the president promised,” Camp said at a media roundtable hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “He promised that he would have quick action and we still don’t have the documents from an agency that is in this administration."

His committee has been frustrated with the administration's failure to cough up emails from Lois Lerner, who ran the IRS department that blocked Tea Party groups from winning the typically quick approval of tax exempt status. Lerner was on Capitol Hill Wednesday where she refused to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

“I still don’t have all of her emails. I still don’t have all of the documents that I’ve requested. The administration promised a quick action, and I’m still waiting for her emails,” said Camp, a Michigan Republican. “I need all of those, before I can conclude.”

By refusing to make good on his promise, Camp said that Obama and his administration is to blame for dragging out the investigations. Had Lerner not refused to testify to his committee earlier, Camp said “we probably would be at the bottom of what this is all about.”

Some said she had about a hundred moments of greatness when she served under President Obama – but, strangely, couldn’t name a single accomplishment of hers, besides marrying Bill Clinton.

Another attendee mentioned Clinton’s stance on abortion as a reason to be super excited for Hillary Clinton in 2016. As for her accomplishments, none came to mind, but she noted that Obama saw a reason for her to be nominated as Secretary of State.

The security of NHS data was thrown into further doubt yesterday after it emerged anonymous patient information has been used by a marketing consultancy to advise clients on targeting their social media campaigns.

It comes amid growing concerns over plans to trawl patient records from every GP surgery in England, which were postponed last month after NHS chiefs admitted they had not done enough to inform and reassure the public about the scheme, known as care.data. MPs sought reassurances last week that the GP data, which could be accessed by researchers and approved private companies, would not be vulnerable to breaches of patient confidentiality.

In another blow to public confidence in the scheme, it was also reported yesterday that the entire hospital episodes statistics (HES) dataset has been uploaded to Google servers.

...In October 2010, you told a Duke University group: “The Supreme Court dealt a huge blow, overturning a 100-year-old precedent that basically corporations couldn’t give directly to political campaigns. And everyone is up in arms because they don’t like it. The Federal Election Commission can’t do anything about it. They want the IRS to fix the problem.”

• Who exactly wanted you to “fix the problem” caused by Citizens United?

In February 2011, you e-mailed your colleagues in the IRS: “Tea Party Matter very dangerous. This could be the vehicle to go to court on the issue of whether Citizens United overturning the ban on corporate spending applies to tax-exempt rules. Counsel and Judy Kindell need to be in on this one please. Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.”

• Why did you think the Tea Party cases were “very dangerous”?

In September 2010, you e-mailed your subordinates about initiating a “c4 project,” but wrote: “we need to be cautious so it isn’t a per se political project.”

• Why were you worried about this being perceived as a political project?

Michael Seto, manager of EO Technical in Washington, testified that you ordered Tea Party cases to undergo a “multi-tier review.” He testified: “She sent me email saying that when these cases need to go through multi-tier review and they will eventually have to go to Miss Kindell and the chief counsel’s office.”

• Why did you order the Tea Party cases to undergo a “multi-tier review”?

Riddle me this, though: Why don’t they just agree to grant her immunity for her testimony? Her lawyer’s asked for it before, and her testimony’s certainly more valuable than seeing her go to prison, especially given the ignominy she’s already suffered for her role in the IRS scandal.

Sargent was elected as a Republican to the 37th Congress; skipped several terms and was reelected to the 41st and 42nd Congresses.

In January 1878, Senator Sargent introduced the 29 words that would later become the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, allowing women the right to vote. Sargent’s wife, Ellen Clark Sargent, was a leading voting rights advocate, and a friend of such suffrage leaders as Susan B. Anthony. The bill calling for the amendment would be introduced unsuccessfully each year for the next forty years.

“After years of fiscal and economic mismanagement, the president has offered perhaps his most irresponsible budget yet. American families looking for jobs and opportunity will find only more government in this plan. Spending too much, borrowing too much, and taxing too much, it would hurt our economy and cost jobs. And it offers no solutions to save the safety net and retirement security programs that are critical to millions of Americans but are also driving our fiscal imbalance.

“In the president’s vision for our future, America’s budget never balances – ever. After dramatically expanding entitlement programs, the president now believes our entirely predictable long-term debt crisis is the next president’s problem. Despite signing last year’s bipartisan budget deal – and touting it as an accomplishment – the president now proposes violating that agreement with a spending surge. What’s more, he proposes raising even more taxes – not to reduce the deficit but to spend more taxpayer money.

“This budget is a clear sign this president has given up on any efforts to address our serious fiscal challenges that are undermining the future of our kids and grandkids. In the coming weeks, Republicans will produce a responsible budget that balances, promotes opportunity, reforms our tax code, saves our critical safety net programs, and places a priority on creating jobs, not more government.“

The flow of water over the falls typically can withstand icy temperatures like those that have frozen much of the country this winter, but Monday's high of 9 degrees Fahrenheit brought Niagara Falls to a standstill - and photographers were there to snap some stunning images of the frozen waterfall.

In January, another record-breaking cold front managed to freeze the mighty falls in a 'polar vortex' that turned the cascading water to ice - and affected about 240 million people in the U.S. and southern Canada.

Mardi Gras, like Christmas, is a whole season - not just one day. That being said, Fat Tuesday is the biggest day of celebration, and the date it falls on moves around. You'll find that Fat Tuesday can be any Tuesday between Feb. 3 and March 9. Carnival celebration starts on Jan. 6, the Twelfth Night (feast of Epiphany), and picks up speed through midnight on Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent..

How do you know which Tuesday it will be?

Ash Wednesday is always 46 days before Easter, and Fat Tuesday is always the day before Ash Wednesday. Easter can fall on any Sunday from March 23 to April 25, with the exact date to coincide with the first Sunday after the full moon following a spring equinox. There you have it. Voila! If you're still confused, get out a calendar that has the holidays printed on it. Fat Tuesday is always the day before Ash Wednesday!

...I had the pleasure of attending an opening night screening Son of God in downtown Denver. The audience was a procession of the demographics Hollywood ignores: women, older adults, minorities, and, of course, Christians. I overheard members of the audience express they want more faith-based movies. Others were excited about the Noah trailer.

A crowd of an estimated 1,000 or so students and professional global warming protesters marched to the White House on Sunday. There were speeches, there were arrests, there were dramatic visual props to bring home the message.

But there were also thousands of Russian troops moving into the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine Sunday, so nobody much cared about the Keystone demonstration.

...Investor Warren Buffet said he supports the project even though it would provide competition for rail transport, an area in which he is heavily invested.

"I don't believe in the Keystone pipeline because of the jobs you'd make building it. You can build anything and create jobs," Buffet told CNBC Monday. "I just believe it's a useful pipeline."

The Obama administration is set to announce another major delay in implementing the Affordable Care Act, easing election pressure on Democrats.

As early as this week, according to two sources, the White House will announce a new directive allowing insurers to continue offering health plans that do not meet ObamaCare’s minimum coverage requirements.

Since the legislation covers both detachable and fixed magazines, it has the effect of to banning popular, low-caliber rifles.

The Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs gave the draft legislation to top firearms experts in the country to determine what guns would fall under the expanded ban.
They discovered that the bill would affect tube-fed, semi-automatic rifles because the magazine cannot be separated from the gun.

Thus, the experts found that at least 43 common rifles would suddenly be considered a prohibited “assault firearm,” such as the .22 caliber Marlin Model 60, Remington Nylon 66 and Winchester 190.

Just having one such gun would turn a law-abiding owner into a felon overnight.

◼ Bertha Landes, a Republican, was the first woman to serve as mayor of a large American city. Elected in 1926, Landes campaigned that Seattle needed some "municipal housekeeping." Among her accomplishments were curbing corruption and reducing crime.

Per Wikipedia: In Seattle, Landes was active in women's organizations, including the Women's University Club, the Women's Century Club, and the Women's Auxiliary of University Congregational Church. She was president of the Washington State chapter of the League of Women Voters.

In 1921, as president of the Seattle Federation of Women's Clubs, she orchestrated a weeklong Women's Educational Exhibit for Washington Manufacturers. Staffed by more than 1,000 clubwomen, it bolstered the spirits of the business community during a period of severe recession. That year, Landes was appointed by the city mayor to serve on a commission studying unemployment,[3] the only woman on the five-member commission.

◼ A Rasmussen poll on Obamacare taken over the last three days has some startling facts: - IJ Review33% say their insurance has changed.
40% view it “favorably” (down from 45% two weeks ago).
56% view it “unfavorably” (3/4 of these say it’s “very” unfavorable.)
58% say free market competition would do more to lower costs
14% say they’ve been helped.
50% say it has made no change.
33% say they’ve been hurt.
All of these numbers show an increase in negative opinions and a decrease in positive ones.

The pension system, CalSTRS, is currently about 70 percent funded, meaning that it has assets that, if projections prove correct, can cover 70 percent of projected payments — the 30 percent that’s unfunded is growing by $22 million a day, or $255 a second.

An unfunded liability, like what the state of California has to the CalSTRS system, isn’t the exact same thing as the normal debt that the state of California carries, but it’s a liability that’s almost as worrisome....

That debt has grown an impressive $25 billion since Governor Jerry Brown took office in 2011. He hasn’t spent one penny on reducing the funding gap — the hook for Crane’s column is that the state assembly’s speaker, Democrat John Perez, has said that California lawmakers need to get cracking on this problem. (To be specific, the unfunded liability is the gap between the payments local governments, community colleges, and teachers themselves have been required by statute to make and the benefits that they’re owed — the state, as sponsor of the pension plan, is the entity legally responsible for filling it.)

Rather than deal with violent gang members, the principal cracked down on kids whose clothing might offend the gangbangers. Now a federal judge agrees with the principal, saying we must not annoy young Mexicans who might turn violent.

Rather than deal with violent students, he cracked down on those who had committed no crime. Students who wouldn’t take off their offending shirts were sent home. Some of them later received telephone threats from gangbangers with threats to “take care of” the flag-wearers.
The threatened students sued, saying their First Amendment rights were infringed. A three-judge panel of the notoriously liberal appellate court was more impressed by the schoolmaster. “We hold that school officials, namely Rodriguez, did not act unconstitutionally,” the court concluded....

The court said clothing emblazoned with the Mexican flag was acceptable because Anglo students weren’t threatening to beat up anyone wearing the Mexican flag. “The [Anglo] students offered no evidence that students at a similar risk of danger were treated differently,” the judge said, “and therefore no evidence of impermissible viewpoint discrimination.”
This is about more than political correctness run amok.

Does the U.S. Constitution give immigrants a right not to be offended by your child's patriotism?

According to the facts of the case cited in the Ninth Circuit's decision, students of Mexican heritage made profane threats against other students wearing U.S. flags on Cinco de Mayo in 2009, and referred to the display of the U.S. flag as "racist." The threats of violence the following year that led to students being barred from wearing such apparel stemmed from that perception as well.

Why didn't school officials challenge that false perception? Isn't it their job to teach facts -- including the fact that the flag of the United States belongs to all Americans of all ethnicities? Perhaps the school should schedule a visit from one of the many Mexican-American service members who have fought under their nation's flag in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 12 and a half years so the students can hear what it means to them.

And further, why didn't school officials take action against those making the threats? Violent suppression of free speech is not just intolerant, it's bullying. Isn't ending bullying supposed to be a major focus of educators these days?

As Eugene Volokh, a University of California, Los Angeles law professor and nationally recognized expert on the First Amendment, noted in a blog post on the case, "[B]ehavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. The school taught its students a simple lesson: If you dislike speech and want it suppressed, then you can get what you want by threatening violence against the speakers. The school will cave in, the speakers will be shut up, and you and your ideology will win. When thuggery pays, the result is more thuggery. Is that the education we want our students to be getting?"

That's a question both the court and the local school district needs to answer, and quickly. If they don't, education will become a distant memory in public schools.

Asked about Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, Cohen said that Putin did not create the crisis and had no choice but to react. Cohen also said that next to Mikhail Gorbachev and possibly Boris Yeltsin, Putin was the least authoritarian Russian ruler in 400 years.

As the crisis inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukrainian Kiev worsened on Monday, the Russian Federation announced that it had called an immediate public meeting of the United Nations Security Council in New York City for 3:30 p.m. ET. The meeting comes as reports indicate that Russian forces, which have surrounded a series of Ukrainian military bases in Crimea, have demanded that they surrender or face “a real assault.”

“If they do not surrender by 5 a.m. tomorrow, we will start a real storm in Ukrainian bases in Crimea,” read a statement sent by Russian military forces to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, according to a minister. This warning remains unconfirmed by Western press outlets.

On the eve of the Netanyahu visit to Washington, President Obama gave a lengthy interview to Jeffrey Goldberg that shows a chief executive who has learned next to nothing about the world in his five years in office.

Obama isn’t good off the cuff, especially when challenged; he is far better with a prepared speech. And what emerged is an awful portrait of the president and his conception of the world....

Goldberg pushes him, asking why (as is obvious) no one in the Gulf believes Obama. “I don’t think it is personal,” says the president; the problem is them, not him, and his analysis is therapeutic: change is always scary, and they are having trouble catching up with it. But talk with Gulf Arabs and one finds quickly that it is in fact quite personal: they don’t trust Mr. Obama. They believe his handling of Iran and Syria and for that matter of Russia have made the world a more dangerous place.

Change is apparently not scary to Mr. Obama, who is confident all his policies are right. Those who disagree are uninformed, or itching for conflict, or ignorant about the risks they will soon face, or sadly unable to adapt to world events. This is the Obama who said of his own nomination that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” If he believes it, it must be so. The Goldberg interview reveals that five years in, nothing has changed.

...Romney’s retort to Obama: “Russia, I indicated, is a geopolitical foe...and I said in the same paragraph I said and Iran is the greatest national security threat we face. Russia does continue to battle us in the U.N. time and time again. I have clear eyes on this. I’m not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia or Mr. Putin.”

...“Russia without the Ukraine is a country. Russia with the Ukraine is an empire.” The scary thing is that nobody in the Obama Administration seems familiar with that saying, or much of anything else about the region. The fallback position for nervous Obama apologists at this point is to snarl at critics, “Well, what do you think he should do, nuke Moscow?” The point is not that a better President would be on a war footing against the Russian empire, but that a better President might have kept this crisis from bubbling over the way it has, or at least avoided further damage to American diplomatic prestige by fumbling the response so badly.

Ukraine accused Russia on Monday of pouring more troops into Crimea as world leaders grappled with Europe's worst standoff since the Cold War and the Moscow market plunged on fears of an all-out conflict.

In 1887, ◼ Susanna Salter (R-KS), daughter-in-law of a former Lt. Governor, was elected mayor of Argonia, a Kansas town of some 500 people. Support from the local Republican Party was key to her victory. The first woman to serve as mayor, Salter became a national celebrity. On March 2, 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower honored her with a proclamation celebrating her 100th birthday.

...The situation in Ukraine has been painted as a conflict between Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the so-called bad guys, and Ukrainian rebels, the so-called good guys who seek to oust Russia from a position of influence in Ukraine and install a new government that will be responsive to the Ukrainian people.

Don’t believe a word of it.

The Ukrainian nationalists are fascists. Washington’s original purpose for staging a coup in Ukraine was to move Ukraine away from Russia and bring Ukraine into the European Union. In other words, the neocons and the bought-and-paid-for “moderates” in the Obama administration wanted to wrest control of Ukraine from Putin’s hands and gain economic and energy control over the country. As Dr. Stephen F. Cohen has pointed out, Western nations, with the U.S. leading the way, have been provoking Putin for decades. We’ve expanded NATO to include former Soviet states – Ukraine looks like the next target – and we’ve attacked allies of Russia, including Libya and Iraq. The U.S. – along with other Western nations – through our incursions into the politics, economics and national security of Russia and several of its allies, has effectively caused the situation that is now unfolding in Ukraine. Cohen is right....

Putin has also been forced to deploy military assets to Crimea, an important region that Russia ceded to Ukraine in the 1950s, when the USSR was reaching the height of its power and Ukraine was one of its puppet states. The majority population in Crimea is Russian, and its warm-water Black Sea ports are critical to Russian military and trade interests. Russia cannot afford to let the Crimean region fall into the hands of the insurgents who are trying to take over Ukraine.

In addition to deploying military assets in Crimea, Putin has contacted his allies in at least eight other strategically located countries to assure that Russia has access to those countries’ military facilities so Putin’s forces can extend their long-range naval and strategic bomber capabilities. In other words, the U.S. interference in Ukrainian politics has resulted in Putin expanding his military influence, while at the same time Barack Obama is bent on shrinking our own military to pre-World War II levels.

There will surely be much debate over whether the Budapest Memorandum is a legally binding agreement requiring action. The U.S. going to war with Russia is likely a last resort for the Obama administration.

...It’s the same threat John Kerry made several weeks ago, but now it’s coming from Obama’s own lips, as (Jeffrey) Goldberg noted (emphasis added):

On the subject of Middle East peace, Obama told me that the U.S.’s friendship with Israel is undying, but he also issued what I took to be a veiled threat: The U.S., though willing to defend an isolated Israel at the United Nations and in other international bodies, might soon be unable to do so effectively.

“If you see no peace deal and continued aggressive settlement construction — and we have seen more aggressive settlement construction over the last couple years than we’ve seen in a very long time,” Obama said. “If Palestinians come to believe that the possibility of a contiguous sovereign Palestinian state is no longer within reach, then our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited.”

For Goldberg to characterize Obama’s statement as a “veiled threat” is pretty significant.

To me, it wasn’t a veiled threat, it was just a threat.

We’ve explored this issue here repeatedly over the years — The only thing that can seriously damage Israel is a U.S. president who steps aside and lets the international mob have its way at the U.N. and elsewhere.

President Obama’s mendacious political promise, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” continues to cast a long and disturbing shadow of doubt and confusion over millions of Americans who have lost coverage as a result of Obamacare. As 2014 unfolds, the most vulnerable senior citizens — those who receive home health care services — are about to learn they are out of luck. Obamacare opens a trap door under them, leaving this elderly population in freefall — with many citizens losing access to home health care.

Add another compelling reason to reverse Obamacare. Whether by accident or intention, the “Affordable Care Act” empirically strips America’s oldest and poorest cohort, all part of the World War II generation, of this basic coverage. Here is how.

On Jan. 1, Medicare’s home health care services, formerly serving 3.5 million elderly beneficiaries across the country, were cut under Obamacare. The cut deleted exactly 14 percent, or an estimated $22 billion, from these lowest-income Americans over four years. News of the forthcoming cut only trickled out the Friday before Thanksgiving, yet another stunning attempt by the Obama White House to reduce Medicare benefits without attracting notice.... read the rest, at the link.

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